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MONTREAL—Quebec’s corruption inquiry steered back into a collision course with the province’s political class with revelations that a powerful union considered calling in favours with the Parti Québécois to stifle the creation of a probe into the construction industry.

Two top members of Quebec’s largest union, the Fédération des travailleurs et travailleuses du Québec (FTQ), were caught in wiretaps from 2009 discussing damaging media reports about the links between organized crime, unions, politicians and the rampant practice of rigging government contracts and misusing public funds for huge profits.

The former executives, Jean Lavallée and Michel Arsenault, are heard fretting about the calls for a public inquiry into the problems, which the Liberal government of the day had been resisting. Arsenault expresses his confidence that the PQ, the opposition party led by now-Premier Pauline Marois, likewise resist such calls.

“The PQ shouldn’t get behind that because if they do they’ll get tangled up in it as well,” he tells Lavallée, before adding: “We’ll talk to Pauline.”

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The testimony comes as Quebec’s political parties gear up for a potential spring election.

Lavallée, who was on the inquiry stand Tuesday, claimed a fuzzy memory and avoided stoking any political fires. He claimed that plans to approach the PQ never came to fruition despite being discussed in three separate recordings played at the commission hearing, one of which refers to Claude Blanchet, Marois’ millionaire husband who was the head of the FTQ’s Solidarity Fund between 1983 and 1997.

In that wiretap, Arsenault tells Lavallée not to worry about a corruption inquiry: “We have a deal with Blanchet.”

Lavallée testified that he did not recall having met with Blanchet or any PQ emissaries, but Marois’ legislative critics were already off and running by that point.

“What we heard is that there was a deal, but I think that everyone in Quebec wants to know what was that deal. Now it’s up to Madame Marois to answer,” said Liberal party Leader Philippe Couillard.

Nathalie Roy, a politician with the Coalition Avenir Québec, was one of the first to call for a province-wide corruption probe in April 2009 and noted that it took six months before the PQ joined her in that call.

“There is no problem with (Claude Blanchet) doing business with the FTQ,” she said Tuesday. “The problem is if the business is done with the goal of influencing his wife.”

Marois’s party pointed to a list of interventions she made between 2009 and 2011 calling for a corruption inquiry. Bernard Drainville, the PQ minister for democratic institutions, said that anyone trying to influence the party’s position on such a vital matter as corruption would have met a “wall of integrity.”

The premier, who is travelling in Europe, did not comment on the Charbonneau proceedings to the media.

The proximity of Quebec’s powerful unions and construction bosses to politicians will resurface in the near future as the commission turns its attention soon to corruption at the level of the provincial government. Though the Liberal party, in government from 2003 until 2012, is likely to face the harshest grilling, there is no predicting who else could fall victim to Justice France Charbonneau’s probe.

Questions about the FTQ’s links to the Parti Québécois will also likely resurface before that time when Arsenault, who ran the entire FTQ union until his recent resignation, takes the stand in the coming days or weeks.

Arsenault is alleged to have been offered a $300,000 bribe by suspected mafia figures looking to access the union’s investment fund. Another ex-member of the FTQ’s construction wing, Jocelyn Dupuis, is facing criminal fraud charges for alleged misuse of union money and, according to testimony, ran the union like his own personal fiefdom.

Lavallée’s testimony was openly critical of the commission’s investigation to date, saying that witnesses like himself are usually presumed guilty before being given a chance to tell their side of the story.

He defended how the FTQ investment fund was administered and said it was not always possible to tell the legitimate entrepreneurs seeking financial assistance from those whose intention was to set up shell companies or launder money.

“We don’t do business with the Hells (Angels) . . . . If we did business with them, we didn’t know about it,” he said. “It’s not marked on the forehead, ‘I’m a Hells.’ ”

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